Artificial Noise-Aided Secure Multicasting Design Under Secrecy Outage Constraint

This paper investigates the physical layer security in a multiple-input-single-output multicast channel, where a common message is transmitted to multiple receivers and only statistical channel state information of the eavesdropper is available. We consider transmitting some artificial noise (AN) along with the information-bearing signal to improve secrecy. To find the optimal AN design, we formulate a secrecy outage probability (SOP) constrained secrecy rate maximization problem. For solving this problem, we adopt a novel transformation of the intractable SOP constraint and establish an efficient algorithm which solves the transformed problem to global optimality. We also propose a low-complexity refinement method to reduce the conservatism incurred by the transformation and an efficient algorithm to find a suboptimal solution when the information-bearing signal is transmitted using single-stream beamforming. Our solution is found to be a valuable generalization of the traditional null-space AN scheme. According to our simulation results, when the number of receivers is less than that of transmit antennas, distributing AN uniformly in the null space of the legitimate channel vectors is near-optimal. When there is no valid null space, transmitting AN will interfere with some legitimate receivers, and the secrecy performance can also be improved with carefully designed AN.